Who Knew: Welcome to the Carb Boom

‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market.

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Many years ago, when I self-identified as an idiot in my twenties, I put myself on a no-carb diet that was popular at the time and still makes the occasional rounds today. For two weeks, I embraced bunless hamburgers, crouton-less salads, beer-less baseball games, and a joyless existence. I probably lost four pounds before something innocuous–let’s be honest, it was the flour tortilla around a burrito–felled my willpower. Soon enough, I was mainlining Cheezits and Parker House rolls as I always had, and left others to their spiralized zucchini noodles and Ziploc bags full of snacking bacon. I like a carb. Especially one that’s been in an oven recently. Don’t be mad.

We’ve had cake shops, pâtisseries, and bagel places in New Canaan. Top-notch cookies are shamefully easy to find. But since I’ve lived here, we’ve been a town without a standalone, dedicated bakery. I can’t say that we’ve suffered; there are many, many ways to get your hands around a Linzer tart or a soft pretzel bun in Fairfield County. But a little spark of pride has been missing for me. Crossing state lines for a pain au chocolat is almost too much to ask of one’s sleepy spouse on a Sunday morning. And when the pandemic turned us all into starter-feeding sourdough nutjobs, I… didn’t do that. I can cook, but the precision and fussiness of baking elude me. Thankfully, we’re out of the woods. There’s an embarrassing richness of carbs to be had downtown, and if you can stomach the parking and schedule the Treadmill Atonement Time™, you can help yourself to more of the good stuff than ever before.

Flour Water Salt
53 East Avenue

I know, I know. This column is called “Who Knew?” and literally EVERYONE, from culinary die-hards to discerning toddlers, knows about Rob VanKeuren’s sourdough-first bakery. I first heard about it in 2018 from a colleague at my New York ad agency who copped to lining up outside GrayBarns for a sourdough loaf every Saturday morning. We all went when he opened his first brick-and-mortar location in Darien in 2018. And through the pandemic, we dutifully pre-ordered and picked up Thursday pizzas, Saturday boules, and holiday goodies (do NOT sleep on the pistachio and sour cherry galette, I beg of you) from that store. When word arrived that a Flour Water Salt was opening on East Avenue, New Canaan folks were straight-up exultant. It ain’t no secret. 

Still, let this serve as a reminder to offer Mr. VanKeuren and his team your full-hearted support. When we visit, the sheer beauty of the selection can cause me to momentarily black out, and I wind up with far too much, bringing an embarrassingly weighty shopping bag home and then stuffing everything–monolithic slabs of focaccia, English muffins the size of Victorian footstools–into the freezer to consume later. My favorites to cut in half and share with a friend the day of: the ham & gruyere croissant, the almond croissant, a bomboloni, and the iconic jambon-beurre-Gruyère-cornichon sandwich.

If there are March Madness brackets for sandwiches, and there absolutely should be, simple, French-style baguette sandwiches are in the Final Four and have a strong chance of taking the entire thing. The only country to have materially improved upon them is Vietnam, where they took a baguette and turned it into a banh mi, and I do not need to sell you on the myriad joys of a well-constructed banh mi. It is sublime. But a jambon-beurre (ham and butter) hits the spot every single time. 

Permit me this needless detour: I was once on a severely delayed train in France, and the conductors went around, as a means of apologizing for the delay, and passed out free jambon-beurre and saucisson-beurre sandwiches, because the French government has priorities, and feeding delayed passengers who are not vegetarians is apparently one of them. Maybe being a hungry, somewhat broke college student skewed my perception at the time, but I’ve STILL never had a more delicious sandwich. The jambon-beurre (with cornichons and gruyère) at Flour Water Salt comes dangerously close to beating this Proustian ideal for me. Such a rewarding chew in the baguette, such a lush slathering of salted butter, such a briny, joyful pop from the cornichons. It’s a conversation stopper, in that whatever you were talking about can certainly wait until you’ve had your next bite. 

An inspiring piece of the Flour Water Salt puzzle: Rob VanKeuren, a Wesleyan econ major with a finance background, attended a yoga retreat in India and decided to re-center his life’s efforts around food. The Tartine (woohoo, San Francisco!) cookbook had a bit to do with this. His story is a lighthouse for any of us who’ve cast about in the corporate world with increasing dissatisfaction in the hamster-wheeliness of it all. I don’t imagine running three successful bakeries in Fairfield County is less of a grind than working market hours, but we can see (and more importantly, taste) the rewards. 

 

Pro tip: since Flour Water Salt opened, the parking lot for 43-57 East Avenue has quickly become one of the Top Ten Most Chaotic Parking Lots in New Canaan, and that’s really saying something. Find a legal parking spot somewhere else in town, and walk there. You’re getting your steps in AND avoiding getting tangled up in Rivian-on-Rivian violence. 

 

Saisons Sucrées
84 Main Street

If anyone has ever, like me, comfort-binged The Great British Bake Off and waited far too impatiently for the divine chaos of pâtisserie Week, this Main Street jewel box shows you the other side of things: what happens when absolutely nothing goes wrong and everything turns out *exquisitely*? 

 

Saisons Sucrées is a disarmingly serene space, with checkerboard marble floors, beveled and paned French mirrors, a friendly team behind the counter, and a bonkers-well-merchandised array of pastries, confections, sandwiches, and macarons behind glass. A friend described the space as “Parisian,” but I think the visual perfection of Saisons Sucrées almost goes a step further into Japan levels of visual perfection–it’s just so just-so, you wonder if you’ve opened the door into a livable Pinterest board. Until the kids with iPads and no indoor voices find it, I will make it a weekly stop on my post-workout rotations. 

Even after reading the difference between pâtisserie and Viennoiserie, I’m not sure it matters. Still, for inquiring minds: pâtisserie covers the artful, delicate stuff—tarts, éclairs, treats whose form you’ll want to appreciate before you annihilate them with your first bite—while Viennoiserie is your flaky, buttery breakfast gang, like croissants and pains au chocolat. Both are in evidence at Saisons Sucrées, just don’t ask me to taxonomize them. 

 

We need to talk about laminated dough, because the Saisons Sucrées team handles it exceptionally well. Dough is “laminated” when layers of butter are folded and rolled into a leavened (whether naturally or with commercial yeast) dough over and over again, creating that signature flaky, pull-apart texture you get in croissants and pain au chocolat. It’s a labor-intensive, humidity-sensitive process that leaves very little room for mediocrity. At Saisons Sucrées, you’ll see all kinds of visual fanciness like vertical lamination (where the layers are visible from the top of the pastry, as seen above.) This is the kind of thing people spend years in culinary school to perfect. 

Here are the five pastries I’ve had the good fortune to try:

• Banoffee Mille Feuille. Crunchy strips of pastry with light-as-air banana cream and caramel piped between them. It looks like it lives in Fraggle Rock, but if you’re not careful eating it, it will live in your hair and on your shirt for the rest of the afternoon—five stars out of five. 
• Kouign Amann (pronounced Kween like queen, and Aman like the hotels). GOOD GOD. This stalwart Breton treat is buttery, dense, caramelized, and if you have a kid who aced their report card, buy them one—eleven stars out of five. 
• Pain Suisse au Chocolat. Like a pain au chocolat’s older sister who just returned from an enlightened semester abroad, these are often made with brioche, but chez Saisons Sucrées, there’s laminated dough and a vanilla pastry cream enclosing dark chocolate chips—five stars out of five. 
• Brownie Croissant (Crownie? Broissant?) this treads a bit close to the Dominique Ansel cronut/ crookie takeover of lower Manhattan a decade ago, but it’s still a top-notch execution, and I bet it’ll be a hit. A shareably long bar of laminated dough surrounds a perfectly square strip of brownie dough. Four and a half stars out of five. 
• Something with peanut butter, chocolate, and piped, toasted marshmallow whose name I don’t know. This was marvelous. Almost more of a confection than a pastry, but I’m not here to split hairs or do math. I’m here to eat carbs. Six hundred and fifty stars out of five. 

 

Badass Bagels

5 Burtis Avenue

The line that started forming at the Badass Bagels Farmer’s Market tent in 2022 never really stopped. We all love these naturally leavened bagels, but I will count the reasons why anyhow. First, they’re a perfectly reasonable size–in an era when commercial bagels approximate the size and density of manhole covers, they’re petite and light by comparison. I also like the classical conciseness of their offering; nobody needs a cotton candy or strawberry-Asiago bagel. The real hook, though, is the cream cheese. Cue the opening notes of Sweet Child o’ Mine because these flavors are certified power riffs: smokey black garlic, pimento scallion, preserved lemon and fried caper, cowboy candy, shallot & Banyuls vinegar. 

 

It’s been hard to go entire winters without these exceptional carbohydrate delivery mechanisms, but since February, we haven’t had to. Badass took over the former Green & Tonic space on Burtis and, since then, has been selling out of bagels pretty much every day they’re open. Every Wednesday through Sunday, early-enough risers are rewarded with not just the farmer’s market DIY bagel experience, but a couple of bagel sandwiches, coffee, and merch. 

One recent morning, post tennis, I grabbed a Poppyseed bagel toasted, with pimento scallion cream cheese and cucumber. For years, I’ve been somewhat shrilly asking bagel joints to wrap my bagel sandwich open face because I like to eat them that way–one side at a time, topped with tomatoes, cucumber, or both, salt and pepper, a bit of hot sauce. It’s perfect, and also, I genuinely believe that only sociopaths eat bagels sandwich-style. See also: scooping bagels should result in a trial at The Hague. Anyhow, I sometimes get a look like I’m being a bit of a controlling, high-maintenance monster. At Badass Bagels, the friendly guy at the bagel counter already knew to do this. It’s the little things. 

 

It’s a perfect time to be pro-carb in New Canaan, and worth noting that EVEN GWYNETH PALTROW eats gluten now. Whether you lean sweet, savory, or somewhere in the flaky middle, these spots serve the kind of lovingly made, joy-inducing breads, pastries, cookies, and bagels that could snap even the most disciplined keto dieter clean in half. I’m not saying your Almond Mom will approve, but your soul—and any friends upon whose doorsteps you choose to drop a goodie bag—definitely will.